Farewell to Browns Lane

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

Jaguar fans are celebrating a couple of anniversaries this year. It's 60 years since the company launched the inimitable XK120 sports car. In the same year, 1948, Jaguar also released the Mark V, their first family car with independent front suspension and hydraulic brakes!
I wonder if, a few decades from now, when the XK120 and Mark V turn 100, the enthusiasts will recognize 2008 for another milestone...the year they tore down the historic Jaguar factory at Browns Lane. Jaguar sold the property to a developer in early 2007. As I write, the assembly halls, the renowned wood shop, engineering, etc., are all rubble, being carted away in anticipation of erecting new buildings in what will be an industrial park.
This has happened in Coventry before. In my years with Triumph, I was familiar with facilities in several Coventry locations. The last time I visited, all were gone save for the old company Social Club. A stainless steel monument marks where Triumphs were built, but the last echoes of the roaring production lines at Canley and Banner Lane died away years ago.
Further south, outside of Oxford, there is no sign of the famed M.G. factory at Abingdon. When it was torn down, many of the original bricks were sold to M.G. lovers worldwide. No one seems to have thought of doing this with the debris of Browns Lane. Jaguar founder Sir William Lyons would probably approve--he was not one to look back.
Jaguar started building cars at Browns Lane in 1952, having acquired the huge Browns Lane plant, left over from WW II, from the U.K. government. The company was building exciting cars and needed more room to expand production. Timing was important. The move from their original Coventry factory at Foleshill was orchestrated with great care. Machinery was installed at each work area overnight or on weekends and materials supplied at the new site. The operators ended a shift in the old factory and started the next one at Browns Lane with no loss of production.
Over the years, Jaguar continued to expand, acquiring Daimler in 1960, which gave them much-needed factory space at nearby Radford to build engines, axle assemblies and other components. A WWII Spitfire aircraft factory at Castle Bromwich, half an hour away, was re-made into Jaguar's body and paint plant. Trucks carrying bodies, engines and other components roared through the big iron gates on Browns Lane, feeding the assembly lines all day long.
Browns Lane is a mainly residential street in the Coventry district of Allesley. For years, the locals put up with the truck traffic and the stream of new cars pouring in and out of the gates for their on-the-road test. However, as production inched up from four figures annually towards the mid-fives, enough was enough and protests were organized. Eventually, with Coventry planning permission, Jaguar closed the Browns Lane gates and opened a new entrance at the rear of the property through an area called Coundon Wedge.
With heavy investment by Ford, the production lines were modernized and car quality improved to J.D. Power Award-winning standards. The new operation was so quiet that you could hold a conversation next to the assembly line where, in the old days, the racket called for ear plugs.
In the end, however, production at Browns Lane was defeated by the lack of a rail line. Jaguar's new X-Type factory at Halewood had its own siding and a rail link was built for the Castle Bromwich plant. Cars moved off the production line and traveled a couple of hundred yards to be loaded on rail cars and taken to the docks. Much more efficient than the dozens of diesel trucks passing through Browns Lane every day. Manufacturing at the historic plant stopped in July 2005. Though the offices, experimental facilities and woodshop stayed for a while, by the end of 2006 the plant was empty and up for sale.
Still on site is the Jaguar Daimler Heritage Trust building, housing the company's archives and car collection and awaiting funding for a new building elsewhere. Fittingly, access to the JDHT is from Browns Lane, but fields of rubble flank it. It faces the administration building, half-buried in shrubbery gone wild and slated for destruction by now. I am told that the local police have been using it for anti-terrorism exercises, reducing Sir William's hallowed office and dining room to wreckage.
There is one more reason to remember 2008; as the year Ford Motor Company sold Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata Motors of India. Jaguar is at a very low point in sales right now, but Ratan Tata, chief executive of the multi-faceted Tata family company, is known as a visionary and car enthusiast. Let's hope that, 50 years from now, 2008 will be remembered not for the end of Browns Lane but as the year Jaguar had a new beginning.

This article originally appeared in the October, 2008 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.